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Solving Problems Using Design

Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design

PALO ALTO — Akshay Kothari’s first assignment at the D.school — formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University — was to rethink how people eat ramen noodles. His last D.school assignment led to a news-reading app that was bought by LinkedIn for $90 million.

While the projects had wildly different end products, they both had a similar starting point: focusing on how to ease people’s lives. And that is a central lesson at the school, which is pushing students to rethink the boundaries for many industries.

At the heart of the school’s courses is developing what David Kelley, one of the school’s founders, calls an empathy muscle. Inside the school’s cavernous space — which seems like a nod to the Silicon Valley garages of lore — the students are taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people.

So far, that process has worked. In the eight years since the design school opened, students have churned out dozens of innovative products and start-ups. They have developed original ways to tackle infant mortality, unreliable electricity and malnutrition in the third world, as well as clubfoot, a common congenital deformity that twists a baby’s feet inward and down.

Those successes have made the D.school the envy of universities around the world. Sarah Stein Greenberg, a D.school alum and managing director, says she receives inquiries every week from universities looking to mimic the D.school curriculum.

The school has also become one of the most highly sought destinations at Stanford. Some of the most popular classes get four times as many applicants as there are seats available. To meet the demand, the D.school is adding full courses and so-called pop-up classes, which focus on a more narrow problem. “Where Did You Go Olympia Snowe?,” a recent pop-up class, challenged students to solve the seemingly most intractable problem of all: rekindling bipartisanship. Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator of Maine, even made a brief guest appearance.

Mr. Kelley, who also started the design firm IDEO, says the goal is to give students — many of them analytically minded — the tools to change lives.

One emphasis is to get students to leave campus and observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems.

That is how Mr. Kothari, a mechanical engineering graduate student, started his ramen project. He spent hours at local ramen shops watching and talking to patrons as they inevitably spilled broth and noodles. Together with a group of other D.school students, he built a prototype for a fat straw that would let patrons have their ramen and drink it, too.

The school challenges students to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on their users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until they come up with solutions that people will actually use.

An important element of the school, Mr. Kelley says, is having students start small, and as they gain what he calls “creative confidence” with each success, they can move toward bigger, seemingly intractable problems. It is not all that different, he said, from teaching someone to play the piano.

A recent boot camp class dispatched students to local hair salons to tackle that age-old problem: the bad haircut.

One group was surprised to learn that sweeping hair off the floor is the bane of many hairdressers. That group designed a prototype for a device that sucks up clippings before they hit the floor. A few courses later, the same students were asked to apply that same analytical process to the shortage of organ donors.

“It’s a guided approach to building that empathy muscle until, pretty soon, they are out there doing it on their own,” Mr. Kelley said.

One of the D.school’s most highly sought courses is “Design for Extreme Affordability.” Over two quarters, students team up with partners from around the world to tackle their real-world problems. So far, “Extreme” students, as they are called, have completed 90 projects with 27 partners in 19 countries. This year, students will work with partners in Cambodia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Senegal and South Africa.

One of Extreme’s more successful projects is Embrace, a low-cost miniature pouch, not unlike a sleeping bag, that helps prevent newborns from developing hypothermia. Embrace’s inventors say the pouch has helped prevent 22,000 infant deaths.

This year, Ian Connolly and Jeffrey Yang, D.school students, formed a partnership with Miraclefeet, a nonprofit based in North Carolina, to design a brace for children with clubfoot for less than $20.

The two spoke with the mothers of children born with clubfoot and discovered that existing braces are prohibitively expensive, difficult to put on properly, and usually an eyesore, which all contribute to low compliance rates.

So they developed a prototype that consists of two colorful, detachable shoes that clip into a brace and are much easier to put on. Last August, Mr. Yang and Mr. Connolly traveled to Brazil to test 30 prototypes until one was a winner. Production is already underway, in low volumes, and by 2015, the students hope to have manufactured 15,000 braces.

Mr. Yang said the project “completely derailed my career plans.” He had planned to pursue a career in academic research. Now, he hopes to get a job in product design.

Mr. Kothari also said his plans took a new path. Before he took his first D.school course in 2008, he said, he spent most of his spare time in front of a computer, brainstorming ideas for websites and mobile apps that never materialized. Design was always an afterthought.

“I had never thought of myself as a designer,” he recalled. “If you needed to crunch some numbers, I was your guy.”

But he says that first ramen assignment became the prelude to a revolutionary new way of solving problems by spending time with people to understand how they live their lives.

In his final quarter at the D.school, Mr. Kothari enrolled in Launchpad, a class that asks students to sign a pledge agreeing to introduce a product or service in 10 weeks.

Mr. Kothari and his partner, Ankit Gupta, spoke with people at Palo Alto coffee shops to get a sense for what they might need. One common frustration people had was the constant fire hose of news they were getting from a wide variety of sources. So they decided they could make the most impact with Pulse, a news-reader application that allows users to customize their news feeds.

They released the app early, five weeks into the course. That timing — just before Apple’s 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference — could not have been more fortunate.

Mr. Kothari and Mr. Gupta were streaming the event on their computers — they had been denied entrance at the door — when Steven P. Jobs, then chief executive of Apple, praised Pulse as “wonderful” in his keynote speech. Instantaneously, Pulse became the top app downloaded for the iPhone.

In April, LinkedIn acquired the company from Mr. Kothari and Mr. Gupta for $90 million.

Because of the D.school, Mr. Kothari said, “I had to use a side of my brain I had never leveraged.”

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